Worlds of MoCap

Abstract

This article examines the contemporary phenomenon of motion capture-based renderings of dance. By taking Nancy Stark Smith's hieroglyphs and Motion Bank's digital score Using the Sky (that explores Deborah Hay's score No Time to Fly) as main examples, a comparison is drawn between analogue and digital traces of dance that both rely on principles of capture instead of following a symbolic notation system. Although one is created by an ink pen and the other by a motion capture (MoCap) apparatus, these different types of drawing display some striking similarities. At the same time there are some fundamental differences in the ontological basis of these images, which affects the way in which we relate to these images and how they invite us to understand dance. Whereas the role of the dancing body as ‘drawing instrument’ remains present, this metaphor manifests itself in a different way in its digital surroundings. By analysing the meaning-making agents that are involved when a dancer is recorded in a motion capture setting and by relating the resulting imagery to relevant theoretical notions, such as ‘phenomenal dance image’ (Stewart), ‘flickering signifiers’ (Hayles), ‘gesturo-haptic media’ (Rotman) and ‘rightness of rendering’ (Goodman), the article traces preliminary answers to two central questions: What do these traces of dance depict? And who is doing the drawing? This article shows how motion capture practices in contemporary dance offer us opportunities to create new worlds through which we may start to know dance differently: artistically, by creating new phenomenal images of dance; analytically, by gaining insight in spatial and rhythmical patterns; and gesturo-haptically, by offering the radical opportunity to re-enact movement through mapping it on to other bodies.

Notes

1 Contact improvisation is an improvisational dance practice developed in the 1970s by Steve Paxton in collaboration with Nancy Stark Smith and others that built on the experimental ideas of the Judson Dance Theater (an informal group of dancers who performed in Manhattan, New York City in the early 1960s) and the principles of Aikido.

2 The specific approach of the markerless motion capture for Motion Bank was developed by Fraunhofer IGD and TU Darmstadt (Kahn et al. 2012).

3 ‘Capturing Stillness: Visualisations of dance through motion capture technologies’ (2010–13) by Ruth Gibson is a relevant example of an artistic research project that challenged this spatial bias by aiming to map dance movements emerging from the somatic practice of Skinner Releasing Technique. One of the key questions of this project was ‘whether stillness remains invisible when no motion can be tracked or whether stillness becomes replete with life as the visualisation process gives life to the dancing avatar’ (Whatley 2011: 274).

4 For example, we can now closely analyse the variability in the execution of a dance phrase (Vincs and Barbour 2013), as well as other features of dance performance that have hardly been studied yet, such as micro movements, repetitive patterns, timing, speed and acceleration.